ThinkConstructive

The Lancet has an important article on comparing the current efforts to implement a climate policy, with tobacco control.

While tobacco smoking has been scientifically shown to cause illnesses, it took a substantial amount of time of fifty years to implement a tobacco control policy. Still, nowdays smoking kills over 5 million people each year, with an estimated overall death of more than 100 million people.

The tobacco industry, through an effective campaign, managed to avoid control by undermining the scientific results and injecting doubt in the science.

Though it was shown that smoking causes health problems in the 1950s, only in 2005 did the World Health Organisation (WHO) bring into force the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control.

We covered recently the book Doubt is their product on the efforts of the tobacco and other industries to delay regulations for products that are harmful to the health and the environment.

Read the full article Climate policy: lessons from tobacco control (requires free registration to TheLancet).

Reference: The Lancet, Volume 374, Issue 9706, Pages 1955 – 1956, 12 December 2009 – doi:10.1016/S0140-6736(09)61959-0

If you google for “daily mail rubbish”, you are guaranteed to find quite a lot of hits.

The Daily Mail is a peculiar UK tabloid; it either has a dirty hidden agenda, or the journalists they employ do not have any journalistic qualifications, or both.

In SPECIAL INVESTIGATION: Climate change emails row deepens as Russians admit they DID come from their Siberian server, the Daily Mail journalist David Rose messes up big time with the headline, and grossly misleads the audience. The word they (what came from their Siberian server?) in the headline, where does it refer to?

1. the Russians?
2. the climate change emails row?

One has to assume they probably refer to “climate change e-mails”. If it is the “climate change e-mails” that the Russians admit they came from their Siberian server, then this is something that was known from the first day the computer crime incident was made known. The files were first made publicly available on a server at a Russian University.

The fact that the first publicly known source of the stolen e-mails was a Russian University server does not necessarily mean that the perpetrator was either Russian or a student at the specific University.  What is known is that those people that committed the computer crime against the East Anglia University used that specific Russian University to disseminate the e-mails. Anything else is conjecture, and it is up to the Russians to provide more information (if they can obtain) as to who placed those e-mails at the university server.

In the side column “CRU ‘can’t be trusted’ says MP” we read about an MP (whose father founded the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at East Anglia University) and his comments on the e-mail computer crime incident. The Daily Mail journalist quotes the MP as saying the CRU “can’t be trusted”. There is no reference to the quote “can’t be trusted” in the side column. Reading the side column, we see that the MP does not say that the CRU “can’t be trusted”. Let’s read it,

The MP whose father founded the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia says it is important that trust in the unit’s work is restored.
Liberal Democrat frontbencher Norman Lamb is the son of Professor Hubert Lamb, who was the first director of the CRU in 1971.
Under his leadership, it gained an international reputation for authoritative and ground-breaking research.
Last night, Norman Lamb, MP for North Norfolk, said: ‘My father was always very concerned that the highest possible standards were met.
‘The university has done the right thing in calling for an independent investigation.
‘It is of critical importance that trust is re-established. We want truth and accuracy, both in small detail and the bigger picture.’
Prof Lamb died in 1997, aged 84.

Apart from the headlines, the article content follows the same pattern of deception. We do not analyse in the blog post. For a better update on what exactly is happening, see Greenfyre’s Youtube videos on debunking the myths on climate change.

David Michaels wrote Doubt is their product, a book about incidents where corporations institutionalize uncertainty and doubt, and influence public opinion so that their profits are maximised while public safety is blatantly ignored.

The book is highly topical for the current case of climate change deniers.

Read parts of the book at Doubt is their product at Google Books.

David Michaels gave a talk at Google for Doubt is their product.

Buy Doubt is their product from Amazon!

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is a scientific intergovernmental body tasked to evaluate the risk of climate change caused by human activity. It was established in 1988 by two United Nation organisations, and produces special assessment reports every six years, based on the latest peer reviewed and published scientific literature on climate change.

The last assessment report (the fourth) was published in 2007 and the next is scheduled for 2013. This month, a special interim report, the The Copenhagen Diagnosis: Climate Science Report, was published by the University of New South Wales (Australia) Climate Change Research Centre, ahead of the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP15) in Copenhagen (Denmark) that takes place in December 2009.

This special report took a year to make and was authored by 26 researchers, most of whom are authors of published IPCC reports. This report is an update to new scientific results from research since the 2007 assessment.

You can download the full report (high resolution PDF 23.3MB, low resolution PDF 3.3 MB) or read it online. You can also read the executive summary in 11 languages (executive summary in English, 166KB).

The results of the report include

1. Greenhouse gases (such as carbon dioxide and methane) in the atmosphere have been increasing. The current concentration of CO2 is the highest in, at least, the last 800.000 years (currently oldest ice cores from Antarctica, expecting to find even older ice cores soon). The current concentration of CO2 is 385 parts per million (ppm), which is 105 ppm above the natural pre-industrial level. The rate of increase also went up; we put CO2 in the atmosphere faster than we did in the 1990s.
2. Every year this century (2001-2008) has been among the top 10 warmest years since instrumental records began, despite solar irradiance being relatively weak over the past few years.
3. It has been reaffirmed that the human influence with increase greenhouse gases is the source of the global warming.
4. Global warming brings on more extreme weather events.
5. There is a large potential source of CO2 and CH4 (methane) in the Northern Hemisphere permafrost (permanently frozen ground). If the permafrost gets warmer, even more of these two greenhouse gases will be release to the atmosphere.
6. Glaciers and ice-caps (does not include Greenland, Antarctica, etc) are melting fast, currently at 1.2mm per year, and have the capacity to raise global sea-level by 70cm.
7. Greenland has enough ice that if completely melted, can raise global sea level to 6.6 meters. Currently, Greenland contributes 0.7mm per year in the increase of global sea level rise. The melting is accelerating.
8. Antarctica has enough ice that if completely melted, can raise global sea level to 52.8 meters. Currently, Antarctica contributes about 0.7mm per year in the global sea level rise. The melting is accelerating.
9. The oceans are warming; the global ocean surface temperature reached the warmest ever recorded for each month of the summer of 2009.
10. Satellite measurements show sea-level is rising in total at 3.4 mm per year since these records began in 1993. The current estimates show that we could expect up to 2 metres global sea-level rise by 2100.
11. There exist global amplifying feedbacks, where the change of the climate in a part of the world can change the climate even further. For example, the loss of the permafrost in Siberia can release the carbon from the ground (estimated to 500Gt), which can further contribute to global warming.

Unless drastic measures are taken to limit greenhouse gases, global warming will be the cause for the rise of the global sea-level and the change of the climate in parts of the world.

Drastic measures must be taken, such as limiting the use of fossil fuels in favour of alternative energy sources, so that greenhouse gases stop increasing.